“There’s no possible way for a deal before the last possible moment”. If Boehner makes a deal before the last tick of the clock, his party will accuse him of leaving too much on the table, according to Bruce Bartlett in this calm, sensible conversation with Yves Smith on Bill Moyer’s show. Spoiler: Bartlett and […]
The banking giants Barclays, Goldman Sachs and Morgan stanley are the three biggest speculators in agricultural commodities. In 2010 and 2011, Barclays made a profit of $840 million speculating on food products in global markets. That money did not appear out of thin air but was taken from the pockets of people who ultimately bought […]
The Obama administration’s ‘Pivot to Asia‘ has focused some attention on our western ocean, but there are two other reasons for thinking a little about what the Pacific means to the U.S., both of them related to shipping. Consider that three of the U.S.’s ten largest trading partners are Pacific rim countries: China, Japan, and […]
Harold Meyerson in the Washington Post talks about this study [pdf], by Emmanuel Saez, which reports that in 2010, 93% of the United States’ income growth “went to the wealthiest 1 percent of American households”. The rest of us fought over what was left. The attention-getting Occupy! movement of last year mainly sold some newspapers, […]
An audit commissioned by San Francisco county in California of 400 foreclosures (from January 2009 to November 2011) has found that 84% of the foreclosure files contained what appear to be clear violations of law, and that two-thirds of them contained at least four violations or irregularities. Among the common irregularities were failure to notify […]
